Posted on 05/10/2002 5:05:41 PM PDT by mdittmar
The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, who has lived apart from her teen-age daughters most of the past year because of threats, plans to leave her post soon to reunite with them.
The departure of Wendy Chamberlin, who arrived in Islamabad shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, comes at a critical time in U.S.-Pakistan relations. American personnel are in Pakistan's rugged North West Frontier province, hunting for al-Qaida terrorists; attacks on Westerners continue in the country; and worry is growing worry that Pakistan's longtime dispute with neighboring India could heat up this summer.
U.S. officials were expected to try quickly to fill the post vacated by Chamberlin, a career diplomat whose tenure included a huge turnaround in relations with a country that now is a key ally in the war on terrorism.
Chamberlin, a single mother whose daughters are 13 and 15, has "started to make her farewell calls," said embassy spokesman Mark Wentworth. She probably will leave within a few weeks.
Her desire to return to Washington also underscores the State Department's recent warning that Americans overseas remain at high risk harm from terrorists, especially at schools, churches and other places where they gather.
Chamberlin's daughters and the families of other U.S. diplomats in Pakistan were evacuated last fall, shortly after Washington launched the military campaign against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network and the Taliban militia in neighboring Afghanistan.
The family members returned in February, but were evacuated again after a church was bombed in March in Islamabad, the capital, and five people died, including a U.S. Embassy employee and her 17-year-old daughter.
The situation remains dangerous. Radical Pakistanis with al-Qaida links are suspects in a suicide bombing this week that killed 11 French engineers and three other people outside the Sheraton Hotel in the port city Karachi.
That attack was the third against foreigners in Pakistan since January, when President Pervez Musharraf banned five militant Islamic groups as part of his support for the U.S.-led war on terror. A suspect in the slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl is now being tried in Pakistan.
The presence of U.S. ground forces inside Pakistan in recent weeks also probably is heightening feelings against Musharraf, said Charles Fairbanks, a Pakistan specialist at Johns Hopkins University.
The United States has troops at several bases inside Pakistan, which were used to support last year's military operations in Afghanistan.
In addition, FBI agents and CIA operatives have taken part in raids inside Pakistani cities to find al-Qaida in recent months.
U.S. government personnel are searching for al-Qaida in the wild northwestern tribal regions of Pakistan, under a recent agreement with Pakistan's government.
"It is a country where Islamic extremism is very strongly entrenched," Fairbanks said. "And inevitably, there would be a gradual recovery of the extremists (after Musharraf's crackdown). I think that's what we're seeing now."
Perhaps even more worrisome for the United States, the long fight between Pakistan and neighbor India over the disputed Kashmir region is again heating up.
India is to issue a government report soon on whether it believes Musharraf has ended Pakistani support for Islamic militants in Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim border area claimed by India, even as the spring thaw makes the entry of militants more likely. Indian and Pakistani forces face each other along a U.N. truce line that divides Kashmir between Pakistani- and Indian-controlled areas.
Secretary of State Colin Powell this week telephoned both Musharraf and India's foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, to discuss "what we might help them do to defuse those tensions," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday.
A top U.S. official for the region, Christina Rocca, also will travel soon to the two countries, Boucher said.
"There is real danger of conflict there," Fairbanks said. "Everyone is worried about what may happen in the early summer."
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